good smell which
kitchens always have when the cook is clean and tidy. This smell and the
trilling of the cricket used to entice us into the kitchen when we were
children, and there we used to be told fairy-tales, and we played at
kings and queens....

"And where is Cleopatra?" asked Akhsinya hurriedly, breathlessly. "And
where is your hat, sir? And they say your wife has gone to Petersburg."

She had been with us in my mother's time and used to bathe Cleopatra and
me in a tub, and we were still children to her, and it was her duty to
correct us. In a quarter of an hour or so she laid bare all her
thoughts, which she had been storing up in her quiet kitchen all the
time I had been away. She said the doctor ought to be made to marry
Cleopatra--we would only have to frighten him a bit and make him send in
a nicely written application, and then the archbishop would dissolve his
first marriage, and it would be a good thing to sell Dubechnia without
saying anything to my wife, and to bank the money in my own name; and if
my sister and I went on our knees to our father and asked him nicely,
then perhaps he would forgive us; and we ought to pray to the Holy
Mother to intercede for us....

"Now, sir, go and talk to him," she said, when we heard my father's
cough. "Go, speak to him, and beg his pardon. He won't bite your head
off."

I went in. My father was sitting at his desk working on the plan of a
bungalow with Gothic windows and a stumpy tower like the lookout of a
fire-station--an immensely stiff and inartistic design. As I entered the
study I stood so that I could not help seeing the plan. I did not know
why I had come to my father, but I remember that when I saw his thin
face, red neck, and his shadow on the wall, I wanted to throw my arms
round him and, as Akhsinya had bid me, to beg his pardon humbly; but the
sight of the bungalow with the Gothic windows and the stumpy tower
stopped me.

"Good evening," I said.

He glanced at me and at once cast his eyes down on his plan.

"What do you want?" he asked after a while.

"I came to tell you that my sister is very ill. She is dying," I said
dully.

"Well?" My father sighed, took off his spectacles and laid them on the
table. "As you have sown, so you must reap. I want you to remember how
you came to me two years ago, and on this very spot I asked you to give
up your delusions, and I reminded you of your honour, your duty, your
obligations to your ancestors, who